Abstract

One challenge in studying cognition over the lifespan is designing
tasks that measure the same construct in different age groups and relate reliably
to real-world outcomes. The current study confronts this challenge by testing a
new paradigm to assess attention in preschool-aged children for comparison with
other measures. Children completed the new “Pop-the-Bubbles” paradigm
plus Flanker and Visual Search tasks, for comparison with parental reports of
behavioral regulation. Correlations between behavioral regulation and measures
from both Flanker and Pop-the-Bubbles suggest that children’s ability to
ignore irrelevant stimuli in these lab tasks relates to their ability to behave
appropriately in everyday situations. Further development of Pop-the-Bubbles for
eye-tracking and a color version of Flanker are underway to test these
relationships more extensively in young children.